NEW YORK -- Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" is arguably the most famous painting in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which this season has devised a way to showcase its Don McLean-touted masterpiece: an exhibit devoted to most of the major artworks by Van Gogh that depict nighttime.

"Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" is not a blockbuster. There are just 23 paintings in the show, along with 10 works on paper and a scattering of sketches on letters to friends and his brother, Theo. Examples of the books he read are open to passages describing night scenes or dark weather.

But it is a very clever repackaging of a handful of iconic Van Goghs. No other major artist of the 19th century has been so vividly associated with brilliance -- Van Gogh painted yellow sunflowers and golden wheatfields; he even lived in a famously "Yellow House" in Arles -- but here we have the master working to paint the absence of light. Believe it or not, the night has a lot of yellow in it, too, at least in Vincent's hands.

"Actually, 'Starry Night' is the product of many, many years of experiment and effort," says Joachim Pissarro, adjunct curator to the museum's department of painting and sculpture, who assembled this show. "He didn't just start trying to paint the night in the last few years of his life, when 'Starry Night,' 'The Night Cafe,' 'Terrace of a Cafe at Night (Place de Forum),' and the rest of his best-known pictures were done. He began very early, almost as soon as he decided to become an artist."

Van Gogh (1853-1890) didn't make that decision until he was 27 (though he dabbled with drawing a little earlier), after he had failed as a lay minister for poor peasants working in the fields and mines of Brabant, in his native Holland. The earliest work in this show is "The 'Au Charbonnage' Cafe" (1878), a shabby inn just outside the entrance to a colliery, where, as he put it, "workers come in their free time to eat their bread and drink a glass of beer." It is, as Pissarro points out, his first "night cafe," down to the crude little crescent moon over the roofline.

To Van Gogh, who was trying to proselytize these workers whenever he could capture their attention, nighttime was special -- it was, after all, the only time when his would-be parishioners were free from work, and therefore available for a little soul-searching. Van Gogh wasn't very good at converting them, but he did manage to identify with their hardscrabble lives, and among his first serious drawings is a picture of a peasant walking past a pollarded tree after work ("En Route," 1881).

Just three years later he was able to produce "Lane of Poplars at Sunset," with its silhouette of a worker against a fulvid sunset. Then, in 1885, he did his first large canvas, "The Potato Eaters," showing a family of laborers in their sod cottage under a spitting oil lamp.

These quite dark pictures were done before Van Gogh encountered impressionism, of course, and heightened his palette. By 1888, when he arrived in Arles and began the incredibly productive last two years of his life under the burning sun of Provence, he was painting wheatfields in the glow of the midafternoon, but he was also producing works like "The Sower." Almost symbolist in feel, it has a setting yellow sun that casts purple and pink shadows, and the darkness of evening seems to congeal in the laborer with his bag of seeds and in the trunk of another pollarded tree that splits the composition in two.

Painting the night with reds, yellows, greens and pinks may seem counterintuitive, but many artists admired by Van Gogh had been working with these harmonies for many years (like Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny, whose "Bridge on the Yonne (Evening)," done in 1875, is a symphony of pinks and oranges, and is on view in the "Paths to Impressionism" show at the Newark Museum).

Sometimes the effect is a little like the camera filters Technicolor Hollywood used to suggest night back in the '50s, which produced a downshift in the hottest hues without eliminating shadows, and takes a little imagination on the part of the viewer.

But by the last galleries of this show, when we get to see Van Gogh's most indelible achievements -- including the two star-pocked landscapes, "The Starry Night Over the Rhone" (1888) and "The Starry Night" (1889) -- Van Gogh is using his imagination as well as direct observation, and the sense of a sudden rush of freedom is almost palpable.

It's hard to really "see" a painting that is so very famous, but after measuring Van Gogh's efforts to capture the beginning of dusk or the effects of gas lighting in a nighttime interior, "The Starry Night" does give up some new insights. We can see, for example, why the artist thought of it as a sketch -- there is quite a bit of blank canvas showing through, and many of the chrome yellow highlights were clearly added when the picture was all but done and the underpainting fairly dry.

But how he made the great leap of showing stars as big as suns in an undulating Milky Way made of alternating strokes of Prussian blue and ultramarines so the night sky seems to explode with supernovae, well, that's beyond technique. It's a little night mystery.